I first became of aware of Kantor through the urban retelling of his controversial Blood Campaigns, in which he would surreptitiously spatter a large X on gallery walls in his own blood, and then wait to be caught. As a result, he has been banned from some of the most elite museums in the world. But in 2004, the artistic community recognized him as their own, awarding him with the coveted Governor General's award for achievement in the visual arts.

Istvan Kantor in a "propoganda pose" with a placard of Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson

For an artist whose central narrative is the subversion of corporate systems, one has to wonder what accepting an award like this does to Kantor's street cred. But despite the media's repulsion/fascination with the anti-artist, Kantor is highly prolific and has a career spanning more than 3 decades already.

Machinery Execution is a compendium of Kantor's insurrectionist themes which, it could be said, all fall under his Neoism umbrella, a movement he founded in 1979. Like the word itself, the art is packed with contradiction and abstraction, but Kantor presents it in such a way that bypasses the intellect and appeals directly to the body.

In the first of three rooms is Spielraum/Playroom - Remains of a Revolution, a dystopian installation involving interactive video projections, sculpture and robotics.

While your eyes adjust to the darkness of the room, a repulsive odour assails you from all sides. It is the smell of an American army tent mounted in the first half of the room. Despite your resistance, the imagination conjures up the possible ingredients of the smell, a macabre melee of must, sweat, and other unmentionable fluids. Inside the tent, if you dare to enter, is a screen which scrolls urgently through Neoist slogans superimposed on a video of post-gender cyborgs in various states of seizure-sex with machines.

We can see the influence of 1950's psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, in Kantor's work. Reich pioneered the idea that sexual discharge is key, both personally and collectively, to psychological health. He was particularly interested in the orgasm, and suggested that the inhibiting of sexual energy, or "body armouring", can lead to grief, violence and even fascism. He invented what he called 'Orgone Accumulators', machines designed to harness this sexual energy.

Kantor's hybrid figures seem both tyrannized as well as augmented by the prosthetic machinery they wear. The figures are caught in a perpetual state of pelvic thrusting, achieved by videolooping, suggesting that one can be both bound and emancipated by technology, not unlike any other fetish.

The second half of the room is barricaded behind a massive, precariously arranged wall of filing cabinets. You must climb a ladder up the center of it, to get to the other side. But when you arrive at the top, there is an unexpected problem. The only way to get over, (without backing down), is by slipping down a playground slide. While you contemplate going through with it, you can watch the three huge screens on the facing wall, onto which are being projected Kantor's videos. What you may not realise is that you are under surveillance, and the precise moment you decide to slide will be captured. An awkward image of you then appears assimilated on the screens, looping along in Kantor's Orwellian fantasy.

At the bottom of the slide are three upright filing cabinets, whose drawers are meant to be opened and slammed, triggering shifts in the videos.

Filing cabinets make consistent appearances in Kantor's work. As Daniel Baird, arts editor for The Brooklyn Rail, puts it: "Kantor realized that the simple act of opening and closing the drawers of a file cabinet, even the grating noise that it makes, is related to a larger bureaucratic system...(that is) emblematic of the mechanization of the body in a highly technological society."

In the second room is the feature-length video Lebensraum/Lifespace - Spectacle of Noise (2004) which is a semi-autobiographical allegory on the battle for living space in the gentrified Capital City (Toronto). Most of the video, a fragmentary montage of Kantor's themes, is saturated in a bile-yellow filter, adding a post-apocalyptic hue to the already jarring footage. The only thing more assaulting than the strobe-like looping of its imagery, is the accompanying soundtrack, which is a dissonant opus of feedback, sirens, tickertapes and panic-sex. The whole experience induces a sensorial anxiety that becomes, after some exposure, hypnotic and even pleasurable.

The narrative of the film, not unlike much of Kantor's work, is not immediately evident because of its overdose style, but is worthy of deeper investigation. Lebensraum (or 'living space') is the story of a rebel "yogaborg" living in a futuristic city controlled by the Rentagon, and whose 'robotarian' population is under constant surveillance. The film gives no relief to the senses, but occasionally tempts the spirit with repetitive phrases like "you can make your dreams come true", only to snap it back to a cold reality, by calling it "impossible".

The third and smallest room is filled with chairs, to which are affixed hand-drawn Neoism placards. You can sit on the chairs, without too much apprehension, and watch a compilation video of Kantor's performances with the MachineSexActionGroup.

Kantor goes out of his way to ensure our physical insecurity in the space which, in only one sense, is a relief because the density of information might be too much to process otherwise. By overloading the body-mind with stimulus, we become more vulnerable, receptive, to the message being put across. Though I can't say what that message is exactly, I find myself loathing and loving it simultaneously. Perhaps something similar occurs in our relationship to the technology we've created. We begin to notice that our bondage to it is as pleasurable as it is inhibitive. So too must the artist have to reconcile the paradox of benefiting from the very system that denigrates him.

Machinery Execution: ISTVAN KANTOR at the Art Gallery of York University (N145 Ross Building, 4700 through April 3. 416-736-5169.